The number of fathers looking after children at home is rising. How are they
coping with the change in traditional roles?

I was in the café at London Zoo with my one-year-old daughter and four-year-old son, trying to get him to eat the jam sandwich out of his panda-shaped snack box before the jelly and the crisps, at the same time as tempting her with a mashed-up bowl of something. It wasn’t going well. Two mothers at a nearby table, their offspring busy demonstrating perfect manners, exchanged glances. “Access visit?” said one to the other just loudly enough for me to hear over the din my children were making.

Such was the rarity a decade ago of a stay-at-home dad. I might as well have been another endangered species at the zoo.

Quite how much things have changed in the intervening 10 years is revealed by new figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Fathers now make up almost 10 per cent of those who stay at home to care for their children. One of these is Pete Bacon Darwin, from north London, a 36-year-old former IT consultant who gave it all up to look after Lilly, eight, and Zachary, six, while his wife Kelyn pursues her career as a barrister.

“It’s been nothing but a positive experience,” he says. No whispers at the zoo? “Nothing like that. We got in with a good NCT [National Childbirth Trust] crowd when my wife was pregnant, and all those mums have been very welcoming of me as the one man in their group. Even when they are breast-feeding, they make me feel included.”

Analysis of the ONS figures has suggested that the 227,000 men who stayed at home to look after their family in 2012 (a rise of 19,000 on the previous year) may be trading places with their partners because male unemployment has risen faster than female unemployment in the recession. In many cases, they have had no choice but to embrace the nappy bag and the school run.

Bacon Darwin begs to differ. “Yes, our financial situation was an important element in our decision, but I could quite happily have carried on with my job. The point was that my wife earned more than I did. If I’d stayed at work, most of my salary would have gone on child care. That starts you thinking. I had never been that career-driven, and the chance of staying at home with my children when they were young seemed like a fantastic opportunity. For us, it felt natural and right.”

My own story is very similar, save that my work as a writer gave me a flexibility that made it easier to fit around child care, whereas my lawyer wife had more rigid hours, even when she went part-time and we shared the load. But, if I’m honest, I still find myself occasionally bristling when school-gate mums or dads with “proper” jobs that take them to the office all day and every day make jokes about me being a “kept man”. They are all smiles as they say it, but there is an undercurrent that I am failing some essential test of masculinity. Child care is no job for a man! Or am I being oversensitive?

“My answer to any of that nonsense is that it doesn’t matter who looks after your children, as long as one of you is at home for them,” says Gary Northeast from mid-Wales, stay-at-home dad to 10-year-old twin girls, Sioned and Eleri. “So when tensions crop up, as inevitably they do, over which of us is doing what, that is what we have to remind ourselves.”

Northeast’s wife, Marilyn, is a deputy head teacher. “Hers is a much more reliable job than mine,” he says. “And she really likes it and is good at it. I’d always been freelance, doing a variety of jobs, but it was about much more than money. I’m an older father. I was in my late forties when the twins were born, and I had seen too many of my contemporaries miss out on their children’s childhoods, and then start regretting it when it was too late. I didn’t want that to happen to me.”

Such a stance may be becoming more common, according to the ONS statistics. For the first time since 1946, half of all babies in 2012 were born to women aged 30 or over, and the figure rises to 65 per cent for fathers. Couples are waiting longer to become parents, potentially giving them both new perspectives on the dilemma of careers versus child care. And more men are thinking about how they want to play their part, rather than doing as their fathers did and disappearing to the office or factory.

“We have different sorts who come to our club,” says Thom Chesser, one of the organisers of the weekly Dads and Littl’uns gathering in south London’s Brockwell Park. “We are all of a similar age, late thirties and early forties, but there are fathers who are freelance and can organise their careers around sharing the child care. Then there are dads who work two- or three-day weeks and alternate with their partners. And we have those who are at home full-time, like me. But I haven’t come across any fathers who have lost their jobs and feel obliged to take on child care while their partners go out to work.”

Chesser, 43, gave up paid employment six years ago with the arrival of his son, Jacob. He now also cares for Isaac, four, and Abigail, 18 months, while his wife, Ann, works in HR at Network Rail. “In my experience, more and more couples seem to be making choices based on what is best for them, their careers and their children,” he says, “rather than the traditional stereotypes.”

His role still causes the odd raised eyebrow. “I remember being with a group of mums who were talking about weaning. I said something about how I was managing with Jacob and one replied, 'Aren’t you clever?’ – as if it was remarkable that a man could cope.

“I don’t tend to get teased by men of my own age. My father did keep sending me advertisements for jobs, but then he looked after my nephews for a week and seems to have realised as a result that this is no easy option.”

Sometimes he encounters awkward situations. “I remember, initially, when I was out with Jacob,” says Chesser, “trying to work out how to ease my way into a group of mums talking in the park without it looking like I had other motives. It can be a bit weird to walk up to strange women and start chatting to them, but if you have a child hanging off your legs, your real intentions soon become clear.”

As numbers of stay-at-home dads increase, so will local networks. But at present, outside major cities there can still be a sense of isolation. Edmund Farrow, from Edinburgh, runs dadsdinner.com, a website for what he calls “house dads”. Father of Matthew, 12, Daniel, 10, and Joanna, eight, Farrow, 39, says he and his computer-programmer wife, Elaine, still bump up against the traditional stereotype of parental roles.

“When we go to medical appointments with one of the children, the doctor still talks exclusively to my wife, even though I am the one at home who has been monitoring the symptoms. And when we meet other couples and tell them that I stay at home, the men go quiet and the women tend to say 'Wow’. Especially when I tell them that I can clean, too.”

Farrow admits he enjoys breaking these stereotypes. A study from New York’s Cornell University, published this week, reports that even when men are at home and their partners at work, they still see housework as a “pink job”. According to co-author Prof Sharon Sassler, “domestic labour challenges their masculinity”.

A feeling Farrow shares? “No. If anything, I sometimes think being a home dad is more masculine. There is something heroic about keeping three children entertained on a long train journey with just an elastic band and a piece of Blu-Tack as props.”

I certainly didn’t feel heroic that day at London Zoo, and I was too cross to confront my detractors. But if I met them again today, in calmer circumstances, I’d have no qualms about telling them that being a stay-at-home dad is the most demanding and most fulfilling job I’ve ever had.